Together, Alone

We hike along a way
we’d usually share abreast,
but right now, we each move
together, alone.

The distance is forced and,
as two pendulums in motion would,
we try to match our steps,
try to meet in mind,
mindful of the gap.

A contagion we can’t see
threatens to separate us;
to divide and conquer
by means of infection
is the metaphor of this age.

This disease might save us,
if we could embrace a truth
writ large by the threat:
we live webs of intersections;
as we go, it is together, all one.

© Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

Let’s make foresight 2020

Lost

Lost—

       Lost—
               something I had found

       now seems lost
among the detritus,
       amid the clutter
and the ephemera,
perhaps in some crack
between one tyranny of obligation
        or another,
or perhaps by accident.

Where are you?

            Where am I?

What is all this,
        that clogs both time and space
and moreover needs
        sorting,
               mending,
                       cleaning.

What?

           Where?

                        Why?

Well, perhaps it is not important.

            Or perhaps I am what is lost.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Flowers I Have Culled

Flowers, flowers I have culled

from the garden of your disaffection.

Small they are,
yet poignant—
they offer a wistful air,
as if afraid to breathe.

Yes, I have culled flowers,
flowers from the garden of your disaffection,
and I have put them in the sun,
to dry into memory.

Small and sad,
vague and rootless,
I could never get near enough
to find the center
so to transplant them
into more fertile soil.

So the only recourse
to their withering
is to cull the flowers
and to dry them,
like the tears I have shed,
to preserve their essence,
yet let them fade
into a less painful memory.

Perhaps I should walk away,
but there is yet a tristesse beauty
that draws me to care, and so
I continue to cull the flowers,
if only to preserve a beauty
that might have opened to the light.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen